[Linganth] Panel looking for meeting space

[P. Kerim Friedman]

How about we move *all* SLA sessions and business meetings to the Bay
area (not SF so that we keep the pressure on the city in support of the
workers, but Berkeley or Oakland), as many other sessions are doing?

600 people have signed an online petition saying they will boycott the
Atlanta conference, many subsections are canceling or moving to the Bay
Area, and other people are simply planning on staying home. For many
people the December meetings conflict with exams or travel plans and
they simply can't go. It seems clear that Atlanta will be a bust, and
it is likely that the AAA board are happy with it that way, since they
don't have to officially break their contract with the Hilton - risking
a lawsuit.

This may be a reasonable strategy for the AAA to adopt for legal
reasons, but it doesn't mean that SLA business meetings and panels need
to suffer as well. We could follow the lead of SEAA, SAW, CAE, SMA,
etc. and still hold meetings in the Bay area in November. Finding space
will be difficult, but it shouldn't be impossible.

kerim

On Oct 27, 2004, at 5:54 PM, Adam Hodges wrote:

> Dear Bay area scholars,
>
> I'm looking for a place in the San Francisco area where the panel I
> have
> organized for AAA could still meet on November 19.  It is a double
> panel
> with about ten scholars, most are coming from overseas and have
> unchangeable
> plane tickets (so a majority of the panel will be in San Francisco
> regardless.)  We would love to find a university willing to host our
> panel
> so we can present and discuss our work with anyone interested in
> attending.
> If you belong to a department or organization at a Bay area university
> and
> would be interested in hosting us, please let me know.  The panel
> description is below, and the topic may be of interest to scholars from
> various disciplines, including linguistics, communication, media
> studies,
> anthropology, sociology, etc.
>
> Many thanks,
> Adam
>
> DISCOURSE, WAR, AND TERRORISM
> Volunteered session for 2004 AAA annual meeting
> San Francisco, November 17-21
>
> Panel Organizers:
> Adam Hodges adam.hodges at colorado.edu
> Chad Nilep chad.nilep at colorado.edu
> Dept. of Linguistics
> Univ. of Colorado at Boulder
>
> SESSION ABSTRACT
> Language is a primary tool used in the construction of cultural
> understandings; and discourses in the aftermath of September 11, 2001
> have
> provided the frameworks through which the world now views global
> terrorism.
> This panel explores the discursive production of identities,
> ideologies, and
> collective understandings of terrorism in light of the Bush
> administration’s
> ongoing “war on terror.”  At issue are how enemies are defined and
> identified, how political leaders and citizens react, and how societies
> collectively understand their position in the world vis-à-vis
> terrorism.
> Intimately involved in the production of cultural understandings are
> the
> media, and importantly tied to the language used by political leaders
> are
> ideologies that drive policy.
>
> This panel joins scholars from around the world and across disciplines
> to
> analyze these issues.  In particular, the narrative of the “war on
> terror”
> is examined in light of the Bush administration’s ideological stance
> vis-à-vis terrorism as a military war.  The discourse and actions of
> the
> administration are looked at within the larger post-Cold War context to
> explain the conflation of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in the
> discourse of the New World Order.  Reactions to the “war on terror”
> discourse are viewed in places such as Serbia, where intellectuals see
> the
> global war against terrorism as an opportunity to upgrade their
> country's
> position on the international stage and revive Serbia's myth as
> “defender of
> the West.”  A gendered perspective looks at the Bush administration’s
> war of
> liberation in light of the masculinization of the Arab population in
> the
> United States and the simultaneous emasculation within the Arab world.
>
> The panel takes a close look at the media’s role in shaping reactions
> to and
> creating cultural understandings of terrorism.  Media reports of AP and
> Reuters are examined with regard to the portrayal of emotions such as
> fear,
> worry, and concern.  The formation of Arab identities is examined in
> stories
> that appear in the New York Times and Christian Science Monitor, where
> “Arab” is used to describe alternately a religion, a phenotype, a
> region, a
> language, and a nationality, sometimes in the same article.  The
> explicit,
> implicit, and presupposed discursive strategies used in titles and
> subtitles
> of the French language Swiss press to construct negative identities of
> the
> Other in the Iraq war are analyzed.  Finally, the Bakhtinian notion of
> heteroglossia and the dialogic construction of meaning are used to
> explore
> the processes by which Western discourses on terrorism are
> entextualized by
> program moderators, guests, and callers in Aljazeera talk shows.
>
> _________________________________
> Adam Hodges
> Department of Linguistics
> University of Colorado
>
> « Le véritable voyage de découverte ne
> consiste pas à chercher de nouveaux
> paysages, mais à avoir de nouveaux
> yeux. »
>   -Marcel Proust
>
> www.adamhodges.com
>
>
>